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“Gah! I jinxed myself!” said my co-worker, who I share an edit bay with. “I labelled the last sequence as “Final,” and now I have changes. I KNEW that I shouldn’t do that. Every time…”

And this is true. Adding FINAL to the name of the sequence will almost guarantee that changes will be given. Often a few seconds after you finished typing “Final.” How often have you opened a sequence bin only to see a dozen sequences with the word “final” in the name?

I saw this pattern when I started assisting over 12 years ago, and I still see this pattern today. Although I have noticed that now people will have one bin that is called CURRENT CUT, and inside that bin is the “****ProjectName_FINAL FINAL FINAL_Absolute FINAL_002” sequence….and a bin called PREVIOUS CUTS will have all the others. But still, the practice is still…uh…practiced. Editors still insist on calling a sequence final. And when it ISN’T the final, they don’t simply rename it to “v_45” or something, they just make a NEW sequence and call that “FINAL final” until they eventually end up with “Final FINAL Final_NoSeriouslyThisIsFinalImNotKidding_008.” And then you end up looking at the CREATION DATE (Avid only, sorry, FCP doesn’t do this) to make sure that, yup, that is indeed the final sequence.

Please stop. You, like my partner, are just jinxing yourself.

I gave up doing this years ago when I was duplicating the “final” sequence for the 8th time. I just increased the version number, and added a date…month/day/year like all of us backwards American’s date things (and my initial, but I always do that when I am working on a cut). So instead of the string of useless “Final_Final_ForTheLoveOfAllThatIsHolyLetThisBeTheFinalFinal,” I end up with “BrilliantEdit_v38_020812_SR.” This way you see the latest version number…or at least the latest date…and who made the change to that cut.

I still do this when I am the only editor on the project…just to keep in the habit.